Promising research on nuclear reactors

Todd De Ryck

I have been a nuclear energy supporter for over a decade. I watch for announcements, press releases and general updates from all nuclear reactor companies. An announcement in July of 2023 caught my eye. The USA Department of Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) awarded a voucher to Alpha Tech Research Corp, a thorium molten salt nuclear microreactor company based out of Utah and Brigham Young University. Pinawa, MB has been interested specifically in microreactors for about ten years now.

Pinawa, MB has an Atomic Energy of Canada site, Whiteshell Labs, in which various nuclear reactor ideas, experiments, trials, etc were conducted for about 30 years, starting in the early 1960’s. The Local Government District (LGD) of Pinawa was formed in 1963 solely for the purpose of providing a town to live for the employees of Whiteshell Labs. At one time, it employed up to 1,500 people and the population of the LGD was as high as 3,000. In the 1980’s operations started the long process of winding down, which is expected to finally be complete in about five years from now.

Pinawa now wants to be a host community for new nuclear reactors and become a demonstration remote community for nuclear microreactors. Based on the GAIN announcement in July of 2023, Blair Skinner and myself initiated a couple of video chats with Dr. Matthew Memmott and John Benson of AlphaTech Research Corp. They were very interesting and informative. We made it known to them that Pinawa was interested in nuclear microreactors, regardless of the technology.

We were not in contact again until March of this year when I asked various nuclear reactor engineers and scientists for their comments on a particular article I thought they would be interested in. Dr. Matthew Memmott was one of the people who responded, with a thoughtful response. At this point, I decided we should get together and they could provide Blair Skinner and I an update on the progress of their technologies. For the last several months, they were buried in their labs with much progress to report!

AlphaTech Research Corp had completed a process to purify the salt so as not to cause corrosion in any part of a nuclear reactor. They also informed us that their reactor will be 12 megawatts of electrical output, and at this point, would need to be replaced once every six years. They also stated that their reactors could be deployed in multiples of up to 100 on a site, therefore they could have customers with as little as 1 megawatt of requirement (the reactor will be able to scale down as little as 1 megawatt) or up to as much as 1.2 gigawatts of electricity required, in 12 megawatt increments! It is also important to note that their reactors will run at atmospheric pressure. A final important point is that thorium from a nuclear reactor is required for advanced medical isotopes. That is, cancer treatment that is able to target and kill only the cancer cells, leaving healthy cells untouched! This is still years away, but Bill Gates knows this and purchased the isotopes left behind from the USA’s Oak Ridge National Labs MSRE (molten salt reactor experiment) in the 1960’s. Bill Gates reactor company is Terrapower and they have a division known as Terrapower Isotopes. Alpha Tech Research Corp is confident they can compete in this market.

Blair Skinner and I are looking forward to many more discussions with Alpha Tech Research Corp, including more detailed technical discussions and also timelines and planning. An interesting article from Oct. 2022 is available here.